I do not own La Corda D'oro.
Kenophobia: fear of empty spaces
One day, he muses, the music will take her away.
One day, her fingers that fly across the strings will bleed. One day she will play until the delicate bones in her wrists fracture under the strain. One day the music will reach a fevered pitch and then…just …stop.
He sees it in her eyes, when she looks up at him to find that it is morning already and she has not stopped playing. Still she does not stop, she looks at him regretfully but finishes the song, and perhaps another.
He sees it in her hands, when she comes down from her room with blisters. She hides them in her pockets when he's around, but he knows.
He hears it in the music, a siren, whispering to her. "Come away, come away," it says.
"Soon," he hears her murmur as she drifts off to sleep in front of her sheet music.
"Not yet," he says, as he pulls a blanket around her thin shoulders.
Sometimes he wants to break the wretched instrument, the manifestation, and the cause, of her deadly obsessions. It would be so simple, cutting the strings with the bolt cutters he keeps in his bedside drawer, breaking the bow over his knee with a satisfying snap. He could always just nudge the thing into the fireplace he'd had built in her studio because she forgets to dress warmly even in the winter. He could always bury it beneath the olive tree out back. Its call, when dampened by earth, would surely not reach her again.
No, he thinks, it will always reach her, it always comes back.
No, when the music finally leaves, it will take her, too.
And so, he tries every day to make her time with him last, tries to drown out the song. He plays for her. Lord knows, he plays for her. Every day of every week he plays a song especially for her but he watches her smile and knows: it is not for him.
One day, Hino Kahoko will fall within the lines of Ave Maria and be unable, unwilling, to get out. The song.. one's very soul would shudder and quake with each note - as hers once did - but those notes will never, can never, be played.
No violin can play without a violinist.